(.net) technology and society

February 05, 2008

Google, Flickr, Rackspace, and Socialtext Agree: Community is Key to Scaling Customer Service

An impressive lineup of mission- and consumer-critical online services discussed scalability today at Customer Service is the New Marketing. Marc Hedlund of Wesabe encouraged these market leaders to trot out their own best practices and practical suggestions for handling success. The conversation boiled down to two recommendations: #1: Get your community involved. #2: Integrate your community's voice into your internal operations.

#1: Get your community involved.

Pratap Penumalli of Google revealed that anything not ad-supported at Google is supported by a relatively small
organization. Their mission is to 'serve, protect, and grow' the user base. (Unlike Zappos and The Geek Squad, Google believes that if you serve the end user, everything else will follow.)

Interestingly, Google has placed a bet on community building via services such as Get Satisfaction, and recognizes stars from the community in its own forums. It turns out that those users are spending 5-10 hours per day in helping other users. Super-users will work for the recognition.

Ross Mayfield of Socialtext reinforced this point by citing that over 70% of product knowledge and help comes from
peer support. Unfortunately, only about 10% of that knowledge around
products makes it into the call center, and just 1% of that is
assimilated and learned into the organization through trouble tickets.

Ross also offered anecdotal results to reinforce the use of peer
support. After one client deployed a wiki and trained its core users on
it, average call times decreased by 10 to 20%. For those that must
defend ROI on such projects, this easily provides a return on both the
cost and time invested into the wiki on an ongoing basis.

#2: Integrate your community's voice into your internal operations.

Ross went on to state that more could be gained by making both
process and knowledge more transparent. Once you've brought these
people together, he recommends that you create a
subset of the community to help with questions in a continual process.
And if growth matters to you, then "you'll need to find a way to hand
over tools and moderation to that community, because that's the only
way that you are going to scale."

Heather Champ of Flickr made the
case for integrating the tools that your customer care people are using
into your actual site. When customer service tools weren't integrated
with Flickr.com, it took her twice as many steps to get necessary
information and to address customer issues. Companies need to avoid
creating a ghetto for customer care information. Once her tools became
integrated, it was easy for her to participate nimbly.

Frederick Mendler of Rackspace
brought the most real-world advice: As Rackspace has grown, they have
had to create smaller and smaller teams so that the service level
remains very high. Because of their investment in people, they actually
go through customer care responses, and customers are always surprised
- and usually delighted - when they receive followup. To the extent
that you can get your community involved in supporting that end result,
the better.

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Google, Flickr, Rackspace, and Socialtext Agree: Community is Key to Scaling Customer Service

An impressive lineup of mission- and consumer-critical online services discussed scalability today at Customer Service is the New Marketing. Marc Hedlund of Wesabe encouraged these market leaders to trot out their own best practices and practical suggestions for handling success. The conversation boiled down to two recommendations: #1: Get your community involved. #2: Integrate your community's voice into your internal operations.